An Irresponsible Age

by Lavinia Greenlaw

  ‘What’s the key for?’

  He had taken off her coat and gloves, and was warming her hands in his. ‘A place to work. They have this cabin up in the woods behind the house and when Merle found out I was working on another book –’

  ‘About piers …’

  ‘Bridges. Anyway, they’re terribly kind and it means I won’t get in your way.’

  ‘You don’t.’

  ‘Not yet, but once you get down to any serious sort of work …’

  She thought she had. ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this new book?’

  ‘Because it’s not important; besides which,’ he said, smiling so lovingly, ‘you haven’t read the first one.’

  If Juliet felt troubled, she was too lulled – by treats and pills and snow – to pursue it. These days her worries flared softly, flickered and went out.

  She and Jacob slept well. They rose late and ate a good breakfast. Jacob ground coffee-beans and squeezed oranges, and went out to the French bakery for croissants or brioches. Juliet had little interest in food but learnt to enjoy what Jacob presented. He was right, it was all delicious and she learnt to say so. He would wake her each morning when the table was laid and they would sit for an hour reading the New York Times, the Littlefield Fencepost or the weekly English news digest to which she subscribed.

  Sometimes Jacob would alight on an article about a politician, a book or a war, and force Juliet into debate. ‘Well that’s obvious but do you really think … Don’t you see … Everyone knows that he … Why agree with her? … Why agree with me? …’ It became clear that while she scanned the papers for an anecdote that might amuse her, Jacob, who appeared to read equally casually, was absorbing names, statistics, issues and facts. He couldn’t help it.

  Jacob’s mind was so acute and energetic that he had learnt to exist in a state of semi-consciousness, otherwise he would wear himself out. This meant that he was averted, absent-minded and often estranged from what he felt and did. From time to time, his mind demanded proper exercise and what Juliet took to be a need for conflict, was a need to be in opposition. These discussions, which could go on for hours, wore her out even though she was attracted to their rigour. Afterwards, Jacob would look as relieved as a racehorse who had thrown his rider and galloped over the downs full pelt, on and on, until he had exhausted the accumulation of his unused self.

  One day, she couldn’t stand it. ‘Why are you attacking me?’

  Jacob looked bemused. ‘I’m not attacking anyone; I’m just talking.’

  He would suggest a walk and they would make their way down the hill and through the woods to the reclaimed railroad, where the trees were so thick that even in winter they made a low roof and sometimes a tunnel. In better weather, the railroad was busy. The locals ran, cycled or skated, properly dressed and equipped, and overtook Juliet and Jacob with a polite bellow, ‘Passing on the left!’

  ‘I hate this,’ said Juliet. ‘Having to walk in a straight line is bad enough but why does it have to be so organised? Why don’t they just wander or stroll? Even their hiking trails are full of arrows and fences, colour-coded, tarmacked and stepped. There’s no … no …’

  ‘No what? Difficulty? Danger? Perhaps it’s because they know how tough their landscape is. They have to be tough with it. You’re spoilt, Juliet. The English countryside is ingratiating – it flatters people into thinking they’re exposing themselves to something grand and wild.’

  ‘I’m cold.’

  ‘Then you should be pleased. That’s just what the English hope for in a walk – difficulty and discomfort. Nothing they hate more than a smooth path and a clear day.’

  ‘You’re English. More English than I am.’

  ‘Am I?’ To Jacob, the idea of belonging anywhere was preposterous.

  Juliet sniffed. ‘I want to go home.’

  ‘But we’re nearly at the river. Come on.’ He took her hand. ‘Listen … A woodpecker … There, no, to the left, up there, look! Look!’ He held her as they watched the bird bounce from one tree trunk to the next. Had she been alone, Juliet would barely have raised her head, let alone stopped. She would have come back from her walk complaining that there was nothing to see.

  They followed the track out onto an old wooden bridge over the Connecticut River and Jacob pulled her to one side, towards the broadening valley to the west. Without Jacob she would have turned back home an hour ago, or if she had reached this far would have hurried across, complaining about the wind or her wet boots, the pain in her face and fingers.

  There were no rivers this wide, no bridges this long and high, in England. Girders rose extravagantly. Slow water, thick with ice, carried sun and cloud away from a silver horizon which folded into soft blue mountains.

  Juliet stared. ‘That is further away than I ever thought my eyes could reach.’

  Jacob held her in place. ‘Do you like it? Really like it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Oh yes,’ but having to speak tore her away from a thought, something to do with depth of field. She shook herself free and leaned forward so that the rail propped her up instead.

  NINETEEN

  On her thirty-fourth birthday, Clara woke up alone. She had been staying at Carlo’s flat for three days while working at the Quondam Building. She would have come to London just for this – to sleep without interruption and to wake at a time she chose.

  Carlo banged on the door. ‘It’s your babies on the phone, wanting to wish you happy birthday.’

  So she listened to the twins sing Happy Birthday while Horace’s voice enlarged into a sob behind them. The twins passed the phone between them, Mabel saying, ‘Not to worry, Mummy. He’s fine, really. You do your work,’ and Sidney adding, ‘You do your work. Really. He’s fine. Mummy. Not to worry.’

  Stefan got hold of the phone, ‘Happy birthday, darling.’

  ‘I’ll skip today and come straight home. Mummy’s coming home.’

  ‘Maybe you should.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘It’s been alright the other times, hasn’t it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Carlo gave Clara a lift to her studio. It was a damp day. A flabby white sky drew the yellow from the old stone edifices of the city, and the bare trees shone brown and looked less alive for it.

  ‘I’m exhausted,’ Carlo said. ‘And I have to spend my days among the lying down.’

  ‘Do you talk to them?’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘The way people talk to their pets?’

  ‘No, more like the way people talk to the mirror.’ He threw the car round a corner and said, ‘One day someone will ask me how my day has been – my day, not that of whomever I’ve been cutting up.’

  ‘Doesn’t Jonathan?’

  ‘Jonathan is sweet, but he likes a good story.’

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

  ‘The thing is, it’s not all I do. I spend quite a bit of time behind a desk or in the lab; no one’s interested in that.’

  ‘Jonathan is rather beautiful.’

  ‘He cooks and cleans, too.’

  ‘If I had a man who looked like that, I wouldn’t waste him on cooking and cleaning.’

  ‘There’s more to a man than a man like that. Oh god, are you going to start crying again?’

  ‘I’ve failed. Sidney is neurotic, Mabel has no human feeling and Horace is a changeling.’

  ‘Sounds like Fred, Juliet and you respectively.’

  They said nothing more as Carlo concentrated on finding a way off the main road. All the sidestreets were gated or marked No Entry.

  ‘A sign of gentrification,’ said Clara when Carlo grumbled.

  Carlo pulled over on the corner by a re-opened factory: ‘I thought that place was derelict.’ Two men were pushing a rail of summer dresses out into the rain. Another, sheltering under a blanket, stood shouting by the back of a truck. A young woman called Kate, who also had a studio in the Quondam Building, wobbled past the men, stroki
ng the dresses. She saw Clara, leant down to mouth hello through the car window and drew a smiley face on the glass. She had just left a nightclub and was on her way to her studio, to sleep.

  ‘The party’s over,’ said Carlo. ‘Off you go. I’m late.’

  Clara walked off down the alley. Kate made her feel old and Carlo made her feel bad. The children gave her life peace and meaning but when she was with them, each tug at her attention got in the way of the completion of a thought. Stefan had always allowed her to turn away, but the children became anxious and tried to follow her. When it got to the point when she could neither speak nor hear, she came to London. After a day or two, she felt empty-handed and went home again. She only felt at ease when she was neither at work nor at home but on the train between.

  That evening, Juliet phoned to wish Clara happy birthday.

  Stefan answered. ‘She’s been in town and is on her way home. She’ll be sorry to have missed you but you can celebrate next month.’

  ‘I’m not coming back till June.’

  ‘I know. I mean New York, the show.’

  ‘What show?’

  ‘She hasn’t told you? She probably means it to be a surprise. She’s got some work in a group show – something the Arts Council are organising, new British artists. I know she’s really excited about seeing you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Of course,’ he said.

  Fred’s new house was tucked under the rim of the city in a part of north London that was attracting attention and would soon be given its own name. Botolph Square had lost half of itself in the Blitz, and was now triangulated by a main road. To the north, strings of Edwardian villas were subsiding into earth perforated by sewers, tunnels and underground rivers. To the south lay some of the last tower blocks to be built in the city. They were hostile and austere, and were talked about as landmarks.

  Fred had taken Mary and Bella to see the house before he signed the contract. Mary watched her daughter run along the hall through the kitchen and out into the garden, and could not stand the idea of taking her home to their small rooms and the concrete square. The estate agent who was showing them round made an assumption and pointed out that there was an excellent primary school at the bottom of the road. Living this close, Bella was bound to get in.

  ‘Well,’ said Fred. ‘What could be more important than Bella’s education?’

  Mary was tired. The house was lovely. Bella was happy. Fred persuaded her to move in.

  At the end of her first week in her new nursery, Bella Clough was asked to bring in a picture of her home. The next Monday, she unrolled her drawing and began to explain it to the class: ‘It’s some of my homes. This is the door to Botolph and this is the door to Khyber.’

  ‘Are those roses in the front garden?’ asked the teacher.

  ‘No, that’s the dog shit.’

  ‘We don’t –’

  ‘Khyber doesn’t have a front garden. It has a gutter. I didn’t have room for the gutter.’

  ‘What’s this under the stairs?’

  ‘The living room.’

  ‘You’ve made it rather dark.’

  ‘It is dark, but the fire is darker. See? I drew all the coals.’

  The teacher was relieved; she had thought they were more dog shit. At break, she stopped Bella on the way out and asked her to tell her more about the drawing. She pointed to a large room with big windows: ‘And this? What’s in here?’

  ‘The living room at Botolph. The new house. Uncle Fred bought it for us.’

  ‘You call him your uncle?’

  ‘He’s my uncle. This is the sofa.’

  ‘How pink.’

  ‘It’s atrocious.’

  The teacher pointed to the figures crouched on the floor. ‘Why is no one sitting on it?’

  ‘Because it’s sharp and they are keeping warm by the fire.’

  ‘Well,’ said the teacher. ‘Perhaps your Uncle Fred will buy you a nice new sofa.’

  ‘He says he will, but Caroline made him forget to.’

  ‘Is she your aunt?’

  ‘No. She came to stay at Khyber when she got tired.’

  ‘Tired of what?’

  ‘Her husband. They live in King Kong.’

  ‘Does she like the sofa?’

  Bella shook her head, ‘Oh no, oh no …’

  When Mary moved into Botolph Square, she was unsettled by the quiet. She was used to hearing people carry out their family lives. Here, they withdrew into separate rooms behind solid doors and if there was any noise, it was of a lawn mower, a burglar alarm, a piano or a violin. On the estate there had always been people around when Mary walked home, no matter how late, but here you turned off the main road into an enclave of swept streets that were empty after dark.

  Their house, too, was quiet. In Khyber Road, everyone had gathered round the fire, even in summer. Here she, Fred and Bella had cobbled together a kind of family life from pre-existing timetables, habits, vocabulary and rituals, but the house easily swallowed up what little of this there was.

  The people who lived there before them had installed wooden shutters reinforced with metal bars. The front garden was covered in decking edged with zinc buckets full of sharp plain plants, and the windows to the basement kitchen were protected by wrought-iron climbing roses.

  ‘Prince Charming would need a blowtorch to get in here,’ Fred said to Bella one day when he had lost his key and they were waiting for Mary to let them in.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘Charming doesn’t kiss Beauty. He dances with Cinderella.’

  ‘So what’s Sleeping Beauty’s prince called?’

  ‘He’s called … he’s called … Prince … Prince …’

  ‘Prince Prince?’

  ‘Exactly!’

  ‘Like he’s all princes rolled into one?’

  Bella wasn’t sure what this meant. ‘Exactly,’ she repeated and then, ‘Oh no!’

  ‘Oh no what?’ asked Fred looking round but Bella just went on shaking her head.

  ‘Oh no … Oh no …’

  In the city, millions of people are pulled past one another night and day. From time to time they will touch or maybe only breathe in someone they could discover they loved. If they did so, they would have a story to tell about how it was the city that brought them together, and when it went wrong about how it had all been down to chance. Fred and Mary might have got on with a life together had they been more determined and not just prompted by a misunderstanding; had they lived elsewhere.

  Mary carried the piece of paper around in her pocket for a week and then decided to ask Fred for advice: ‘Do men mind if we phone them?’

  ‘Who’s we?’

  ‘Me, I suppose.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I don’t mean you, I mean men. And women. Do they mind?’

  ‘Could you be more specific?’

  ‘If a man gave me his phone number, could I ring him and if so how long should I wait to do so?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Shall I ring him?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh for god’s sake, I’ll just ring him.’

  ‘Mary?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Do you like the new sofa?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I hadn’t noticed. Sorry. Why are you sitting on the old one?’

  ‘I suppose I’m used to it.’

  ‘Things change, Fred. Go and sit over there.’

  He got up and went to sit on the new sofa, feeling a little thrilled because Mary had told him to do so. He had been meaning to throw the old one out. Under these high ceilings, the furniture from Khyber Road looked like the contents of a run-down dolls-house. Mary took the cordless phone from Fred’s study and carried it up to the top of the house. She shut the door behind her and sat in a corner. ‘Hello. Alexander Strachan? It’s Mary George. The one who’d got on the wrong Tube … Yes … You were very kind. Stupid of me. Would I? Oh yes. No, I can’t do Tuesday, Saturday’s tricky. Wednesday week? Fine. Next Wednesday.
Charing Cross at eight. Yes, under the clock. See you then.’

  Mary went to Charing Cross to meet Alexander Strachan. She tried to remember what he looked like. Tall, but that was relative. Tall compared to her, yes, but not compared to Tobias. She felt sick. Was this a date? When had she last gone to meet a boy? A man. Alexander Strachan was at least her age, if not older. She was thirty-one. Wasn’t his hair receding from his temples? She remembered a large and shiny forehead. Was it really shiny or was she making that bit up? Was it really large or had that been just the angle from which she looked at him? She had been sitting on a bench and he had been standing. She probably should have stood up, too. That would have been polite. He could hardly have sat down. He had been wearing a sober coat and a suit, but perhaps that was just for work. What was wrong with suits? He might have looked good in his suit. She couldn’t remember. Nor could she find the clock, as the station was masked by hoardings and scaffolding. She tried not to be seen glancing at her reflection, which she did whenever she could as her fine hair, which she had wound into a knot, was coming loose and several strands now flapped about her face. She had something stuck between her front teeth, she knew it, and the most persistent sensation of having got her skirt caught in her tights. Oh god. Her left hand kept tugging at her skirt, while her right hand touched her front to check that her shirt hadn’t burst open. Her throat was hot. Was she red? Was her shirt too undone? As she left the house she had hugged Bella, who examined her mother’s chest and did up an extra button. Mary’s body felt hot and damp. Her hands were damp. Her sweat smelt. Her breath smelt. She knew it.

  ‘Mary?’ Alexander Strachan. Tallish, fairish, nice. ‘I thought we might go to a place I know in Covent Garden. Do you like fish, it doesn’t matter if not, they do other things, I mean meat and things, unless you are a vegetarian, but then I’m sure they can do something, you know, with vegetables. Anyway. Is that OK? It’s not far.’ They set off, walking unnaturally far apart, smiling, amazed.

  The waiter guided Mary into her chair and gave her a menu. She looked directly at Alexander for the first time: ‘I have a daughter. Bella. She’s thirty-two. Her father’s dead. He was called Tobias. He’s dead. I’m three –’